Microsoft Bot Framework Update

Microsoft Build last month yielded many exciting announcements for developers, among them Microsoft’s Bot Framework, which provides what you need to build and connect intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever your users are talking.

It’s so exciting to see an ecosystem emerge since releasing a month ago – more than 20,000 developers have signed up and gotten started. We’re delighted by the initial reaction of the developer community to the potential of Bot Framework and truly appreciate the many enhancement suggestions and code contributions being made by the community to the Bot Framework open source Bot Builder SDKs available on GitHub.

Today we’re pleased to provide the following updates:

The Bot Directory, the public directory of bots registered with Bot Framework, is now open to developers for bot submission and review. The Bot Directory itself isn’t live yet, but when it is available, users will be able to discover, try and add bots to their favorite conversation experiences.

Beginning today, those favorite conversation experiences can include Facebook Messenger. With the addition of Facebook Messenger as a supported channel, your text, image, card, and button capable bots may reach more people across an even broader variety of the world’s top conversation experiences – from Skype, to Slack to Text/SMS, Office 365 mail and more.

With Microsoft Bot Framework, it’s your bot wherever your users are talking. Thanks for all the great feedback and input within the past month; we’re pushing hard and look forward to providing additional updates in the near future. Here’s a few screen grabs of the review process, including a look at a bot entry in the directory (once it goes live). Get those submissions going, and if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it.